Gallstones: An Ounce Of Prevention Is Worth…

If you have some gall, we hope it’s the kind that causes you to exasperate others, and not the kind that hurts in the center of your upper belly, under the ribs, and occasionally spreads to your right upper back or shoulder.  Gallstone disease is the most common and costly of all the digestive conditions in the United States, accounting for nearly a million hospitalizations a year.  It can interfere with breathing and become severe enough to wake you from sleep…if you can get there in the first place.  Sometimes a person will vomit and relieve the pain; at other times he’ll get feverish from an outright blockage of the bile duct that connects the liver and gall bladder to the small intestine.  With a blockage, urine turns dark, stools are clay-colored, and the whites of the eyes may yellow.  We hope it never gets this far.

While allopathic medicine preaches no sure way to prevent gallstones, it allows that there are means to reduce risk.  Staying close to your ideal weight is important.  A real concern with this is that, lately, everybody is jumping onto the “lose weight fast” bandwagon.  It seems that gallstones can form from such a regimen and even from gastric bypass surgery (Shiffman, 1991).   In obesity, bile tends to stand still and cholesterol saturation increases.  Stones can form within a month of severe caloric restriction, as much as twenty-five times more likely than in obese persons who lose weight gradually (Weinsier, 1993).  Once in a while a person gets lucky, and there are no symptoms, despite the fact that most middle-agers probably have small stones.

Whether it was intended to be a mnemonic or not, the association of the “Five F’s” with gallbladder disease has been around for a time.  Female, fair (hair and skin), forty-ish, fertile (gallbladder trouble is associated with high estrogen), and owning too much fat risk gallstones.  But alcohol intake, a high-fat diet (especially fried foods) and sedentary lifestyle are contributing factors.  In an acute gallbladder attack, people will generally go to the ER, where they will get antibiotics and medicine for the pain, which will probably go away.  If an obstruction is noted, surgery will be done.  In a chronic gallbladder condition, surgery, either traditional or laparoscopic, will remove the gallbladder.  In circumstances that can be pinpointed only by a physician, medications called chenodeoxycholic acids or ursodeoxycholic acids can be given to help dissolve the stones.  But this can take as long as two years and the stones often reappear after treatment is stopped.

It is advisable that, if you are prone to gallbladder problems, you eat a low-fat, low-sugar, high fiber diet.  Decreasing fat limits the amount of work the gallbladder has to do every day.  Increasing fiber helps the liver to eliminate toxins faster. Besides, anything that supports liver function also helps it to make more bile.  Alternative treatment of gallbladder disease relies on increased bile production, liquefaction of bile to help get rid of gallbladder sludge, and dissolution of stones so they can be reduced to a size that can pass naturally. Production of bile can be increased with foods that reduce toxic burden on the whole body, including beets, artichokes (Saénz Rodriguez, 2002), greens, and cruciferous vegetables (Tsai, 2006).  Acidulated water also stimulates liver function. Even a shot of unfiltered apple cider vinegar can help.

Since an ounce or prevention is worth more than a ton of cure, take a look at what coffee does for gallbladder disease.  Harvard scientists found that increased intake of caffeinated beverages reduces the risk of symptomatic gallbladder disease in men, while decaf demonstrated no such effect (Leitzmann, 1999).  In a ten-year study of male healthcare professionals, the incidence of gallbladder attacks was significantly lower in those consuming coffee regularly.   A novice coffee drinker might get the jitters and act like Barney Fife charging his cylinder, but the tradeoff is worth it.  Later study by the same researcher discovered a parallel benefit for women (Leitzmann, 2002).  Using ultra-sound to document gallbladder disease, the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination found that, among women, there was a decreased prevalence of previously diagnosed gallbladder disease with increased coffee drinking (Ruhl, 2000).

Primates and guinea pigs are unable to create vitamin C from diet, so supplementation is required.  The enzyme needed to convert glucose into ascorbic acid was lost eons ago.  Without vitamin C, even guinea pigs get gallstones, although we have never seen tiny guinea pig ambulances in our neighborhood.  From the same health and nutrition exam cited earlier, which ran from 1988 to 1994, researchers from the V.A. Center in San Francisco saw an inverse relationship between vitamin C intake and gallstones, strongly so among women, less so among men (Simon, 1998, 2000).  Vitamin C, by the way, affects the catabolism of cholesterol to bile acids.  Using guinea pigs as, well, guinea pigs, Swedish investigators learned that deficiency of vitamin C causes supersaturation of bile and the subsequent formation of cholesterol gallstones.  But they also found an interesting side story in humans.  Increasing ascorbic acid also increases phospholipid concentrations, leading to a strong inverse association with the conditions that lead to stone formation (Gstafsson, 1997).  German scientists came to the same conclusion about ascorbic acid when they found half the incidence of gallstones in a female population that supplemented with vitamin C regularly (Walcher, 2009) (Lammert, 2004).

Anecdotal reports about healing protocols abound.  But some of them are surprisingly supportable.  When a person is hospitalized for gallbladder disease, his food is typically replaced with intravenous fluids.  In a while, the pain goes away, after which time you’re allowed to eat.  It’s believed that some foods invoke an allergic response that is at the root of gallbladder attacks.  In a casual test done in the late 1960’s, Dr. James Breneman, the chair of the Food Allergy Committee of the American College of Allergists, asked 69 people suffering from gallbladder pain to try an elimination diet to determine food allergies.  After the identified foods were taken from their diets, symptoms disappeared.  The offending foods were tagged.  Eggs, pork, onions, chicken and turkey, milk, coffee, and oranges were most bothersome, followed by corn, beans, nuts, spices, peanuts, fish and rye.  In addition to foods, twenty percent of the group had attacks caused by medications (Wright, 2004).

Pain and the fear of surgery will direct a person to the least invasive solution he can find, whether it’s clinically proven or not.  There is at least one such remedy for gallstone dissolution that seems to be popular outside the U.S.—a gallbladder cleanse purportedly designed by a Korean chemist named Dr. Lai Chiu Nan.  It entails drinking four glasses of apple juice (or eating four-five apples) daily for five days.  The juice is supposed to soften the stones.  Maintain a normal diet during this time.  On day six, no dinner is enjoyed.  At 6 PM, a teaspoon of Epsom salts in a glass of warm water is consumed, followed by a second such cocktail two hours later.  Magnesium sulfate opens the gallbladder ducts (Harvey, 1973).  At 10 PM, swallow a half cup of olive oil mixed with a half cup of fresh lemon juice, to lubricate the stones and to ease their passage.  Green stones are supposed to drop into the toilet the next day.  If they don’t, use the olive oil and lemon juice to make vinaigrette.  If they do, a gemologist might make you an offer.  Hey, sometimes folk medicine really works, as in the oatmeal baths for itchy skin or lemon juice and honey for a sore throat.

Bile synthesis has been improved and increased by taking essential fatty acids, most notably fish oil.  In a head-to-head contest with fibrates (drugs used to lower triglycerides and cholesterol), fish oil was found to up the ante on bile acids and to alter their distribution (Jonkers, 2006).  But this wasn’t the first time that fish oil stood in the limelight.  Gall bladder emptying increases with fish oil, as gall bladder motility improves and triglyceride levels drop (Jonkers, 2003).  And it sure works on monkeys (Scobey, 1991).  In prairie dogs, who must be kin to guinea pigs because they are prone to gallstones, menhaden oil (an occasional source of commercial fish oil) increased levels of EPA and DHA and reduced incidence of cholesterol crystals (Booker, 1990).

We normally think of solvents as able to dissolve things, but almost never relate them to the human body except in old Vincent Price movies.  Some scientists might disagree with this neglect because they have learned that gallstones can sometimes be dissolved by plant-sourced solvents, especially a terpene called limonene, common to citrus fruits and recognized as a safe flavoring agent in foods and beverages.  An unsaturated hydrocarbon from plants, limonene has been tried and proven to be a dissolver of cholesterol stones (Sun, 2007), while a welcome side effect is the relief of heartburn and GERD (Ibid.).  In a trial dating back to the 1970’s, a blend of limonene and polysorbate 80 (an emulsifier) was found safe and effective in the lab and the clinic (Igimi, 1976).  Occasionally following gallbladder surgery, stones are retained in the duct.  Injecting a limonene preparation directly to the biliary system was able to dissolve retained stones (Igmini, 1991).  Efficacy was enhanced when limonene was mixed with a medium-chain triglyceride in a Japanese study done toward the end of the last century (Shionogi, 1992).  Besides citrus, a readily available source of such solvent is peppermint oil.  Whether it works orally to dissolve gallstones is under investigation.  It’s doubtful that some of us can wait for the results to be printed.

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